Rabat -After several months without live music and festivals, WeCasablanca is set to return in late October to mark its fifth anniversary and celebrate Morocco’s cultural diversity.
Scheduled to take place at the recently rehabilitated Velodrome stadium between October 21-24, organizers of this year’s WeCasablanca festival have promised to grace the event’s visitors and fans with “4 days of colorful musical celebrations, carried by very beautiful Moroccan voices.”
In a statement, organizers also highlighted that the festival will feature a rich, diverse program and celebrate the new generation of young artists exporting Moroccan music.
As well as paying tribute to Morocco’s cultural diversity, the festival wants to put emerging artists on the limelight to boost their visibility on the Moroccan and international cultural scene.
“The artistic line of the festival takes its roots in Casablanca’s DNA to make it an intergenerational event intimately linked to the Casaoui plural identity,” WeCasablanca explained in a press release.
The festival is organized by the Local Development Company (SDL)”Casablanca Events and Entertainment” in partnership with the urban municipality.
The company launched the brand “WeCasablanca” in 2016, affirming the identity of the city following the signing of a 2014 convention chaired by King Mohammed VI and dedicated to territorial promotion of the city of Casablanca.
SDL’s mission is to develop and implement a strategy to boost the overall attractiveness and competitiveness of Casablanca – both as an important cultural scene and as a go-to tourist metropolis in the world.
Casablanca Events and Entertainment deploys structuring projects, manages the city’s sporting and cultural infrastructure, and organizes different events promoting the Moroccan metropoly as a dynamic site for cultural and economic activities.
COVID-19 restrictions and festivals
Amid the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, Moroccan authorities cancelled important sports and cultural events that annually attract hundreds of thousands of visitors to the country.
This meant festival-goers and lovers of Morocco’s vibrant cultural scene were deprived of the unique experience of attending world-renowned cultural events like the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, Mawazine Music Festival, Jazzablanca Festival, Marrakesh Short Film Festival,Tanjazz Festival, among others.
As Morocco continues to make notable progress in its fight to curb the spread of COVID-19, the government has eased its COVID restrictions and moved the national curfew from 9 p.m to 11 p.m.
And with recent data suggesting that the North African country is on track to reach its vaccination goals and effectively curb the spread of COVID-19, it remains to be seen when Moroccan authorities will lift the ban on festivals and other large-scale cultural events.
